Touring the East Tennessee Backroads (Touring the Backroads Series)

What do miniature golf, the Cherokee alphabet, country music, the atomic bomb, and the long-lost State of Franklin have in common? They were all born in East Tennessee, of course. Author Carolyn Sakowski drove over three thousand miles to update routes and directions for this second edition of Touring the East Tennessee Backroads. Though she didn't much care for filling her gas tank, she loved reacquainting herself with the region's rich history and unforgettable personalities. Readers of this popular guide will meet frontier legends Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston. They'll encounter a pair of future presidents—the hotheaded, gun-toting Andrew Jackson and the fugitive Andrew Johnson—at decidedly unpresidential moments in their lives. They'll witness where John Sevier assembled with the Overmountain Men during the American Revolution and where William Thomas's Cherokee legion fought in the Civil War. They'll see Rock City, visit sites on the Trail of Tears, and travel to the courthouse where Clarence Darrow battled William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes Monkey Trial. They'll enjoy the best East Tennessee has to offer, from its mountain passes and TVA dams to its historic homes, churches, and gravesites. The thirteen tours are amply illustrated with black-and-white photographs for the benefit of vacationers and armchair travelers alike.

The historical facts in the first edition of Touring the East Tennessee Backroads have not changed much since the book was first published in 1993, but highway construction and development has altered the routes of the 13 tours. For this second edition, the author drove over 3,000 miles to update the tours where people such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, Sequoyah, Nancy Ward, and Clarence Darrow once traveled the same backroads.

Library Journal

In her discussion of eastern Tennessee, Sakowski ( Touring the Western North Carolina Backroads , Blair, 1990) here reveals such surprises as where miniature golf was invented and where the first nationally distributed country-and-western records were recorded. She lingers over the characters, economics, and battles that have put this part of the country on the map. In a format similar to WPA's Guide to Tennessee (Univ. of Tennessee Pr., 1986. reprint), Sakowski gives precise directions to many historic locations, picnic areas, and scenic views of untraveled Tennessee. She drops some startling remarks, such as, ``When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, . . . most of . . . Oak Ridge was stunned to learn that . . . their whole community was centered around producing this bomb.'' These stories hold the reader's interest. Recommended for libraries having patrons living in and visiting eastern Tennessee.-- Carolyn L. Stoddard, New Hampshire Tech. Inst. Lib., Concord